The Redstar Perspective

Leave it to those clowns - Yankees fans - to run this poll:

Glad to see Boston sucks less than D.C. (as of 6:48 pm, 7/31/07)

What’s up!!  We’re wicked pissa!!!!

Overheard, at Boston House of Pizza in Brighton, between two young dudes horsing around during a lunch break from unloading  a moving truck down the block:

African-American kid says to his SE Asian buddy to get him to stop acting up,

“This isn’t Dorchester or Roxbury.  This isn’t the hood.  I live in Brighton now.”

Word.

It’s official - I’m a progressive blogger.  Critizing David Brooks is the litmus test, and it looks like I’ve passed.

Now on to Bill O’Reilly!

More fun with names, this time sorted according to income!  (Fun fun!)

Apparently, Jack is a rich kid’s name.  I’m sure my dad and his b/f/f and my godfather - both Jacks - would love to know that their good old Irish nickname has risen from its Dorchester neighborhood roots to fancier environs.  It’s a whole new take on white flight.

Via.

Grumblypants.

Grumbly mcCrankypants.

Cranky mcGrumblepants.

Grumbly grumbly.

Grumble.

Grumble.

In high school, I had a lying, cheating deadbeat stalker of a boyfriend (is “deadbeat stalker” an oxymoron?). Other than that, and our very public, very adolescent, screaming fights, we were more or less inseparable for two+ years. One of the few good things about him was his middle child status, which primed him for easily responding to my only-child demands and quick irritability (”get me a tissue”; “i want to watch House of Style” “I don’t feel like it!” etc. etc.). Among the women in my family, this snappishness and short fuse is in abundance, and after that disastrous relationship, it was a long time before I ever felt comfortable enough again with someone to reveal this side of my personality.

Luckily for me, the M.A.S. and I are completely different in our emotional manifestations. Where I am easily outraged and aggravated, he is soothing and chill. Where he is petulant and morose, I am patient and sensible. Just now he visited me here in the computer lab with a smile and a kiss, a wonderful contrast to the whiny blogging I’d just finished moments before. Make today the second in a row where he’s had to make way for my frazzled irritation and temper.

In the course of last evening’s rush hour drive from Brighton to meet my dad and stepmom in Quincy for dinner, the M.A.S. and I were either stuck behind people driving 25 mph, or swerving to almost avoid being hit (3x). I’d hung up from a conference call 10 minutes prior to jumping in the car, and I was completely out of my mind when we arrived at Marina Bay, where I handed the M.A.S. the keys and drank 2 cosmos in no short order. I pictured myself vibrating like the characters in that old Comedy Central cartoon about the shrink (name??), and overall I felt like my cousin T.K. in one my favorite of her exasperated moments.

For those of you who don’t know my rad cousin, she has been going on 40 since she was 10, when she used to have a cup of tea and read the newspaper before school. She’s polished and professional and generous and kind and absolutely in charge, and admittedly, sh*t gets under her skin much less than it used to. Like this time:

It must have been ‘98 or ‘99, when we were both at our first jobs out of college, and hers brought her to NY on business, where I worked and lived. It was a Friday, and we’d planned to commute up to Boston together from the city, stopping over in CT to pick up my mom’s car so I could drive it the rest of the way to Boston (don’t ask me why this was the plan; it’s a classic convoluted strategy of my divorced-parent-life to appropriate their belongings for my own use). At 23, I was in full-throttle-love with NY and my upstart-career-gal life in it, and we were planning to take the Metro North from Grand Central, one of my favorite places in the city in all its classy bustle. For some reason, we agreed to take a ride from Canal Street (my office) uptown from my friend Gladys, a second-generation Chinese-American woman at my firm who is one of the most earnest, unpretentious people I’ve known. She loaded us into her two door car that was stuffed with boxes full of fliers promoting her Asian organization’s 2G’s new play. T.K., at just over 5feet, lucked out with the backseat, jammed in next to the boxes. We proceeded to snake our way uptown in Friday afternoon traffic, Gladys chattering cheerfully all the while.

When we finally arrived at Grand Central and unfolded ourselves from the car, we were immediately overwhelmed and almost run down by the hordes of seasoned commuters streaming about the place. I’m pretty good in crowds on my own, but my dodging and weaving strategy is essentially a solo effort. I was feeling particularly cheerful and at ease that afternoon with T.K.’s company in the city and the promise of a new romance awaiting me in Boston that night, and I was likely sauntering my way towards my train as realistically as possible on a commuter timetable.

Meanwhile, T.K. had about had it 2 minutes into the car where she was packed like a sardine without reprieve from Gladys’s pharmaceutical marketing nattering (our industry) and absent-minded, herky-jerky driving through traffic. Launching T.K. into the dense rush of Grand Central was almost too much for her to bear, and I’m surprised she didn’t melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West from the sheer sensory overload of it all. Instead, she did her best to fold up and disappear and avoid contact with any of the “unwashed public,” as she likes to call her former public transportation comrades. She even held it together when we squished into one of the mini-seats on the Metro North, the ones with no window or leg room that were added as profit-boosting afterthoughts and are not meant for anyone over 3 ft tall. We managed to enjoy ourselves in the sheer comedy of our two-woman show of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

She finally cracked up two hours later in New Haven, where we grabbed some pizza before getting in the car for the two hour drive home. By now the memory is fuzzy, but it remains of T.K. dancing around in the pizza place, at her wits end, commanding me to get going so we could “get the hell out of dodge.” In my revisionist history of the moment, there is even some mock gun slinging.

I realize as I write this that this poorly recounted memory is likely only funny to me (and possibly T.K.). But re-capping it it has been exactly the therapy I’ve needed this afternoon to shake off the sheer frustration of the last couple days. Quite possibly the only other equivalently enjoyable memories would be of my dear American Type-A friend K trying to reasonably negotiate her way through the Tanzanian bureaucracy when she was in charge of communications for an NGO there. Most of our days together ended in hysterics over the endless run-arounds she got from the system and its employees in trying to publish and distribute a fundraising calendar. These hysterics usually resulted from me laughing out loud at her woes and her thankfully catching on that the situations were as ridiculous as they were enraging. “You see” became a favorite catchphrase between us, in fond memory of the way many Tanzanians began their explanations to her of why they hadn’t returned her call, paid their invoice, printed the calendar, etc. etc. etc.

You see, Redstar readers, it is not possible for me to do anymore work today, because I have been very irritated and unproductive from trying to do work earlier. And now, because I have taken all this time trying to work but doing no work, it is time for me to quit working/not working and begin my weekend! Please come back on Monday!

My enthusiasm for this pro-poor legislative victory just bubbles over at Foresight. (Site is screwy so scroll down for the post.)

Since it will be some time before my own presidential campaign is launched, perhaps you’ll want to take this helpful quiz to identify your candidate in 2008. 

I had my results posted and in editing this lost them.  If I remember correctly I was:

1) 100% for “Theoretical Ideal Candidate”

2) Mid-80s % for Kucinich and Obama (in that order),

3) and 76% and 77% for Edwards and Clinton, respectively. 

4) Bloomberg: 69%; Richardson: 63-ish%;

5) Guiliani: 29%. 

6) All the other GOP clowns were near or below Guiliani, with a high of 35% for Huckabee, I think, and 5% for Gingrich.

 Information link  to compare the candidates platforms.  (Interestingly, while it asks about age and marital status, it does not ask you if you have a race/ethnicity or gender preference for candidates.  Lame.)

So apparently the rest stops on the NJ turnpike vary in their offerings - some have Starbucks and Popeye’s fried chicken. Others nothin’ but Burger King and some sad lookin’ hot dogs (e.g., Vince Lombardi). It helps to know in advance their line up along the highway, so as not to get screwed w/crappy Cinnabon coffee at 9pm on a Sunday night in traffic when you really need the ‘bucks caffeine jolt to carry you through the remaining 5 hours home to Boston.

We here at the M.A.S. seem to believe we’re holding on to our youth a little more tightly than it feels now on this Monday morning. We left Baltimore at 6pm last night and got home to Boston after 2am, only to have to unload 12 boxes from the car and then debate whether or not to leave the car in front of the hydrant rather than park in authorized but far-off and sketchy parking land at almost 3 am by now (We stayed in front of the hydrant, Brighton-style. No ticket this a.m. Nice!) Asleep by four, up at 11am by alarm to try to capture some semblance of a normal day.

I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck, and I’m definitely not fully awake even as I type. Yay coffee.

But it’s good to be home, after a busy busy week of consulting work mixed with non-stop visits to family and friends in the D.C. metro area. A half doz Maryland blue crabs at Obrycki’s before we got on the road last night and some great convos about past and present relationships got us through the long ride home. I know the M.A.S. is already gunning for a third round of mini-golf to try and steal the Championship title I’m still holding after round two last week in suburban VA, one of our few moments to ourselves (other than an impromptu field trip to HUD on Saturday night while we waited for friends to meet us in the city. But more on that urban planning geekiness later. Round 1 was in Sarasota in March with my dad and stepmom; I schooled them all.)

Thanks to Weboy and Sheelzebub (at Pandagon) for posting on topics near and dear to me, though I’ve definitely got a response to the former in the works when I finally bounce back here.

In the interim, if you had your own personal turnpike, who would you name your rest stops after? (One of the many fun highway games we played. Another: Redstar’s Presidential Campaign Platform! “No More Traffic.”)

Where tonight in D.C. I rode past an informal homeless tent city set up under the highway directly in the shadow of H.U.D. 

Where at the Washington Nationals baseball game I watched an adult man wrestle a flying bat from the hands of a bunch of 10 year olds, who looked not a little bewildered and crestfallen while he pumped the bat in the air in victory. 

I had been shooting for a funny, light post - the M.A.S. did leave the game tonight with a baseball discarded by the Rockies’ batboy that the 16 year old girl beside him grabbed and then casually handed to him because she alread had one.(So don’t buy his story that he hurled himself backwards over three rows in order to catch the foul ball with one hand). And the Nats came from behind to win in the 10th and all in all it was a great night.

But then I see this: that essentially FEMA has knowingly exposed 120,000 families to cancer-causing formaldehyde rather than conduct environmental testing on their trailers, as that would indicate their “ownership” of the problem:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency since early 2006 has suppressed warnings from its own field workers about health problems experienced by hurricane victims living in government-provided trailers with levels of a toxic chemical 75 times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers, congressional lawmakers said yesterday.

A trail of e-mails obtained by investigators shows that the agency’s lawyers rejected a proposal for systematic testing of the levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde gas in the trailers, out of concern that the agency would be legally liable for any hazards or health problems. As many as 120,000 families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita lived in the suspect trailers, and hundreds have complained of ill effects.

One man in Slidell, La., was found dead in his trailer on June 27, 2006, after complaining about the formaldehyde fumes. In a conference call about the death, 28 officials from six agencies recommended that the circumstances be investigated and trailer air quality be subjected to independent testing. But FEMA lawyers rejected the suggestions, with one, Adrian Sevier, cautioning that further investigation not approved by lawyers “could seriously undermine the Agency’s position” in litigation.

There are still 66,000 families living in trailers.  Because there has been no systematic testing, we have no idea of how many of them are at risk.  Now that the gig is up, David Paulison, the head of FEMA, even admits that there may be mutiple environmental issues in trailers - mold or mildew, for instance - in addition to formaldehyde exposure.

There’s no shortage of outcry:

But other lawmakers charged that FEMA’s response augurs poorly for the nation’s emergency preparedness. “I haven’t seen this level of government incompetence outside of the nation of China. . . . And they executed an official in China for not having done their job,” said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), alleging parallels in lax consumer regulations and an uncaring government.

and

“We have lost a great deal through our dealings with FEMA,” said Paul Stewart, a former Army officer living in a trailer with his wife in Mississippi, “not the least of which is our faith in government.”

Jesus, maybe we should get that guy a room at Walter Reed for his recovery.

Last week, when I joined the vociferous masses at Pandagon with some patient explanation of how they could better channel their energies towards Gulf Coast recovery, my ability to be rational and clear in the face of crisis or complexity came shining through.  But honestly, F*** That.  Seriously????  We not only sanction warehousing the very poor, the elderly, the disabled, and kids in isolated, risky trailer parks but then also willingly ignore repeated warnings of cancer exposure, disease and death?  Were we hoping they’d all drop dead so we could just put the trailers back in storage for the next mass creation of a refugee population due to our laziness and selfishness that prevents us from investing in an infrastructure that will distribute risk more equitably across entire populations? 

I know these stories of deliberate, institutional cover-ups are endless.  I remember getting choked up when chastising those in my Biz school ethics class who confessed they’d also try to do nothing were they the executives who tried to bury women’s risks and deaths caused by the Dalkon Shield I.U.D. in the 1970s.  But now I work with Gulf Coast survivors and activists.  And one reason I don’t live there full time is because it is too god damn depressing.  I CAN’T BELIEVE THE PLOT OF OUR GOVERNMENT’S CRUELTY CONTINUES TO THICKEN.

The NY Times thinks the Presidential candidates should hold their debates in New Orleans, given its our favorite poster child for government neglect and disinvestment, and domestic woes more generally (sorry Detroit, Gary, Camden and Newark).  That’s the least we can do.  Seriously, while I hope the Bush Administration goes down in history at least as one of the most morally bankrupt we’ve ever had to suffer through, we need to pursue real, systemic change far beyond electing the latest figurehead for our horribly inequitable world.  I rarely urge readers to take action, but lately I’ve been fantasizing about winning the lottery so I could buy cars for all the evacuees that could drive, and invest in affordable housing, and set up education trust funds for my paternal cousins, and on and on, while I’m at a friggin’ baseball game.  This is what it’s come to - philanthropy fantasies. 

Again, please contact your congressperson and tell them you want to see action (H.R. 1227 and S. 1668 - the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Acts) on bringing people home in the Gulf Coast, by recognizing their right of return, and by building affordable housing (and not substituting housing vouchers), especially for the very-low income, elderly, disabled and homeless.  Please tell them you want to see Charity Hospital re-opened in New Orleans ASAP, so the indigent can receive much needed medical care.  Pay attention to the presidential candidates for their plans for rebuilding the Gulf Coast, for building additional affordable housing for the nation, for alleviating the economic insecurity of the more than 40M people living near or in poverty (officially, anyway), and for expanding health insurance coverage, so we’re not all paying for the high and excessive costs of emergency room care for the uninsured. 

But advocating for legislation is actually the easy part. Pay attention to, CONFRONT, racial and economic segregation and discrimination.  We don’t live together, we don’t go to school together, and we hardly talk to one another anymore.  We live in a racially and economically polarized and unequal world.  If you look around, it’s likely you’ll just see more of the same.

(Coming to you live from the Fairfax Cty suburbs, where I’m too pissed to include links right now.  I’ll get to those later.) 

NYC’s steam pipe explosion this week warns us not to exceptionalize the failures of the levees in New Orleans in 2005. 

I always attributed the free heat common in NYC apartments to the giant steam god living above the city.  It turns out, she’s more of an Underworld Goddess:

“In New York, home to the largest steam system in the world, steam is pumped through more than 100 miles of mains and service pipes to customers such as the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. It is also widely used by dry cleaners and hospitals”

…and tenants who don’t know how to adjust their radiators so it is not 85 degrees indoors year-round.

Good to see also that Boston’s Czar can keep an eye on our own steam repairs between his endless media appearances. 

I’ve noticed around the blogosphere that many posters have a couple themes they fall back on when the rants or chatter just aren’t flowing as fast as we’d like: @ Pandagon, Friday Random Ten FILL IN THE BLANK HERE, @ Oh For Fun!, PBS Monday, and @ The Curvature, Bad Ass Women’s Activist of the Week. 

Lately, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Gulf Coast housing reports, legislation and activism, but I haven’t quite sorted through it all to post eloquently here.  And in approximately 12 hours the M.A.S. and I head off for a road trip to DC, where I’ll be greasing palms for Campaign ‘08…kidding!!  Where we’ll be visiting the M.A.S.’s and some of my dear peeps.  Therefore, may I present a pilot theme for The Redstar Perspective, Screw You Tuesday, where each Tuesday (or Monday night), I’ll post some recent links to some unfair sh*t going on in the world.  Cuz remember what mom said, “life’s not fair.”  (Although my aunt always told me, “You play, you pay.”)

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(UPDATE, 7/16/07: Apparently the Masshole accent is easily confused with the Canadian accent immortalized in Degrassi High, the nasal sounds of Ohio brought to life in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, or the gritty voices of old Westerns. See the comments below.)

Still flying high from the Pandagon coverage of the last couple days, which of course leads me to exploring new blogs and freedom fighters (of all stripes) in the ’sphere this morning. Unsurprisingly, many are way more sophisticated than me in maximizing all the free fun stuff there is with which to decorate our blogs. Try as I may, I can’t seem to make enough of this site without wanting to gouge out my eyes from the effort. Nonetheless, in honor of a great week fighting the good fight and “meeting” new people in this virtual world, here’s a cheerful Sat morning post filled with goofy sh*t I’ve discovered, courtesy of all the great, faceless peeps out there:1) My own Peculiar Aristocratic Title:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Noble Excellency Redstar the Wholesome of Withering Glance Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

2) My Blog Rating:

3) Me and the M.A.S., as Simpsons Avatars:

Create Your Own!

4) My Accent:

(Though the M.A.S. tells me it goes from this to Bahstan after either three drinks, or more than a few hours with my family)

Enjoy!!

This just got more interesting….

Now this is what I call leading by example…

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

“We in storage,” said Ann Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole’s three children. “We just in storage.”

Here’s hoping we can get this coverage on New Orleans evacuees to surpass this foolishness on the NYT’s most e-mailed list (and even place it on the most blogged list!).

The Times today offers a seriously depressing and enraging view into the lives of the (most likely permanently) displaced from New Orleans, a population that includes sizable numbers of the elderly, disabled, low-waged and unemployed. In addition to describing in vivid detail the daily struggle of more than 43,000 families living in “limbo” in FEMA-subsidized apartments and trailer parks - the latter where public transportation stops only a couple times per week, and “hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears” - the article also covers the absolute failure or resistance of government at all levels to assist renters from either coming home or rebuilding their lives in their new locations.

A summary of malevolent government action and inaction, and what you can do, after the jump.

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Those Bushes sure are expensive!

Via.

Hey! Teacher! Leave Those Kids Alone!

But I digress.

My colleague Jason at Foresight has a clear and terrific post about the Bush Administration’s ideological war against expanding health insurance for uninsured children (As of 2005, approximately 17% of kids in the U.S. are uninsured). While he takes pains to explain the role of private healthcare insurers versus government programs, his strongest words are in the last three paragraphs regarding how the Bushies seek to pit them against one another (my emphases):

The worst part about the administration’s argument, however, is the claim that CHIP undermines private insurance. Whether this is true or not, it makes private insurance a good in and of itself, and weighs the value of providing universal coverage to children against the value of protecting private insurance companies. Whatever you believe about the importance of competition and market discipline, most Americans do not believe that private insurance companies who cannot make a profit except by providing care to young children have a god-given right to exist. Children have a right to health coverage, whether it comes from the public or the private sector. If private insurers cannot make enough of a profit on their paying adult customers to sustain themselves, then guaranteeing them access to poor children is hardly the job of the government.

But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the Bush administration thinks it is. Whereas most people think it is the government’s job to correct market failures, like the fact that private companies are not providing insurance to the poor at a price they can afford, the administration thinks it is the government’s job to subsidize private companies to do things the government can do better. This is why our tax dollars are currently subsidizing private insurers to provide Medicare “Advantage” services which they cannot produce as cheaply as the government. And this is probably why the administration would rather not pay for an expansion of CHIP: it won’t help the private insurance companies increase profits.

Might the administration be putting private profit ahead of America’s children? You didn’t hear it from me.

You can say you heard it from me, I’m always willing to throw myself under the ideological bus! (Though props to Jason for laying out the argument so succinctly!)

I’ve written extensively here about HUD’s efforts to demolish half the public housing in New Orleans, a project underway since long before the storm, in part due to what is known as “demolition by neglect.” (The local Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), has been in receivership and under HUD control since the early 2000s.)  HUD/HANO’s machinations in the Crescent City are part of a larger, much longer movement in the U.S. to get the government out of the business of housing the poor, though mortgage subsidies, especially for the wealthiest Americans, continue to be a core staple.  In addition to a class action lawsuit filed against HUD for refusing to re-open public housing, a House-Senate bill for affordable housing in the Gulf Coast would re-open 3,000 public housing units, guarantee any one-for-one replacement should demolition occur, require demolition be in phases and reflect residential input on redevelopment. 

I am repeatedly amazed that post-Katrina criticisms of HUD/HANO stem far beyond the vociferous cries of displaced tenants and a small group of righteous activists who fight for the future of public housing.  In meetings with heads of national community development organizations, foundations, and other large institutions, I hear the same complaints of stonewalling by HUD: how dealing with them is like “dealing with the devil,” how municipal and regional leaders can’t “get a call back from [them],” and so on.  The complaints - and shock - are widespread among individuals used to having at least the appearance of a two-way conversation with politicos.

So, it is with great pleasure to see one settlement reached in a case filed against HANO by a former public housing tenant who was denied an apartment promised to her in the River Gardens mixed-income development that replaced the St. Thomas projects prior to Hurricane Katrina.  A settlement requires that HANO and River Garden set aside fixed numbers of affordable units for former tenants, including some specifically for the elderly, and some for first-time homebuyers in current and planned buildings going up on the site.  In addition, “other HANO clients, defined as anyone who is, or was of Aug. 28, 2005, living in public housing or getting Section 8 vouchers to rent private housing,” are also prioritized for the units.  The settlement requires River Garden management to adequately market the available units, including “to the many former HANO tenants who are still Katrina evacuees [by posting] information about available River Garden units “in the housing authority offices in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and Houston.” 

Perhaps more pleasurable than the actual outcomes are the words the judge reserved for HUD/HANO’s brutal, roughshod treatment of its Gulf Coast tenants, in which he lambasted River Garden and HANO for leasing “units meant for St. Thomas residents to HANO management employees at rates designed only for low- or no-income occupants.”

“The scorn and incompetence visited upon those citizens in such perilous need set a new low for federally supported agencies, whose very reason for existence was to provide decent low-income housing,” Beer said, deriding HANO for putting its own employees in River Garden “all the while playing bureaucratic games with those whose lack of education or understanding left them essentially without an avenue of relief.”

“The central tragedy here is that their callous and indifferent ‘leadership’ was not unlike that which stalked our city generally after Hurricane Katrina,” Beer wrote. “That same, self-serving, uncaring, ‘pass the buck’ bureaucratic swampland followed the examples set by city, state and federal officials.”

His only mistake, I’d counter, is his use of the past tense “stalked” and “followed,” and his limiting of this “callous and indifferent ‘leadership’” to the city. 

When I worked full-time in economic development, I longed for a deeper understanding of the systemic phenomena of racial, class and gender inequality I was responding to in low-income, predominantly minority communities around the country.  After a time in which I traveled between New York (East New York), Memphis, Tampa, Miami (Liberty City), Los Angeles (South L.A.), Chattanooga and Boston (Roxbury) for various program ops, I left to pursue a PhD. 

Now, as I enter my fourth year in the Ivory Tower, I feel fortunate - if not a little harried - to be splitting my time between the cocooned halls of Cambridge and the shocking reality of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.  As my work in the Gulf deepens, I am increasingly accepting work that seeks to redress the endemic, systemic inequities of racism and poverty that strangled too many communities for eons prior to the suffocating chokehold of the 2005 hurricane season.  As my collaborative efforts stretch beyond the boundaries of New Orleans, even Louisiana, to Mississippi and Alabama, everyday my Northeastern, liberal assumptions and condescensions are confronted while my outrage, radicalism and desire for equality and justice are simultaneously stirred up.  In that vein, I’m devoting this post to an extremely upsetting racial injustice that my Foresight colleague Lydia Bean is fighting - alongside many others - in Jena, LA. 

I can’t do the nature of this conflict justice (no pun intended), so I’m urging you to visit the many links I’m relying on to tell the story here. 

In a nutshell: Last September, in the mostly white (90+ %), 3,000 person town of Jena, LA (the largest municipality in rural LaSalle Parish, LA), a few black students at Jena High School - after asking and receiving “permission” from school officials - sat down one afternoon in the shade of a tree long known as a “whites only” student respite.  The following day, three nooses hung from the tree.  Though the school principal recommended the students responsible be expelled, the Parish superintendent overruled him and suspended the perpetrators for three days.  Six black students staged a protest over this punishment, and were threatened by the D.A. after he and police were called to campus over their stance.  Escalating racial violence pervaded the town after that, with a black student beaten at a white party, a white man threatening black youth with a loaded gun at a local convenience store, an attempt to burn down the high school, and finally, a group of young black men beating up a young white man.  Across these altercations, the white instigators were never or modestly charged for their aggression; in contrast, six black men were arrested, held on five and six figure bonds, and charged with felonies that could earn them upwards of 80 years in prison.  The first has been convicted, by an all-white jury overseen by a white judge, and “defended” by a publicly-appointed attorney who called no witnesses, and generally appears to have done virtually nothing to protect his client.  

Lydia, along with her parents (Rev. Alan and Nancy Bean), run a non-profit organization titled Friends of Justice that is one of several organizations (including the ACLU and other legal defense groups) that are organizing and raising funds to fight for equity in the justice system on behalf of the young black men know known as the “Jena Six.”  Please, just take a look at some of the links below.  I personally, can barely get past the existence of a “white tree.”

One of the beauties of the Internet and the blogosphere is that traditional media have begun encouraging comments on their stories.  I particularly like this blogger and this local (LA) newscast on the Jena trial because of the diverse comments from readers that follow.  Jena, by most accounts, until these last months, was a peaceful place to live, and folks are clearly agonized over this fall out.  For some it’s the unwanted scrutiny of their lives and their town, for others it is the long overdue airing of the racist dirty laundry of a town where convention frees a local barber to cut only white hair:

“I don’t think we’re racist here,” barber shop owner Billy Doughty, 70, said. “People work together, go to school together. We never talk about race.”

But Doughty does not cut black men’s hair. Never has, never will. He tells that to the occasional black would-be customer.

“That’s the thing about working for yourself,” he said. “I don’t do shaves. I don’t do shampoos. I don’t cut black hair. I don’t think it’s racist. I just don’t do it.”

And that, many black people say, is the key to race relations here — you’ll get along as long as you don’t want much.

“This is a good town to live in for things like no crime, it being peaceful,” said Caseptla Bailey, whose son is facing attempted murder charges. “But it’s very racist and they don’t even try to hide it. It’s like, stay in your place or else.“

(all my emphases)

At Foresight recently, Lydia took her progressive colleagues to task for disparaging the South as an isolated, backwards place in the U.S. that has distinctly failed to rise above racism and injustice.  (The link, unfortunately, isn’t working.)  I was in New Orleans at the time, and wrote a long, confessional comment in response to her fair and righteous anger.  I leave you now with excerpts from this article by a civil rights attorney in New Orleans, Bill Quigley, about the Jena case, to test your own dismissive tendencies when digesting something you cannot understand or believe. 

But blacks in this area of Louisiana have little political power. The ten person all-male government of the parish has one African-American member.  The nine member all-male school board has one African American member.  (A phone caller to the local school board trying to find out the racial makeup of the school board was told there was one “colored” member of the board).  There is one black police officer in Jena and two black public school teachers.

This is solid Bush and David Duke Country - GWB won LaSalle Parish 4 to 1 in the last two elections; Duke [a former KKK member] carried a majority of the white vote when he ran for Governor of Louisiana.  Families earn about 60% of the national average.  The Census Bureau reports that less than 10% of the businesses in LaSalle Parish are black owned.

Whites in the community were adamant that there is no racism.  “We don’t have a problem,” according to one.  Other locals told the media “We all get along,” and “most blacks are happy with the way things are.” One person even said “We don’t have many problems with our blacks.“

Some concluding remarks following my three-part series on power and politics:

Watching Zoolander at my dad’s a few weeks ago (please lament my lack of cable here), I realized the model for the future George W. Bush Presidential Library already exists. 

May I present, the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good (and want to do other stuff good too):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-s37G1dIzo

(Sorry, can’t embed the clip for some reason)

We probably shouldn’t expect any less confusion in the planning stages, either.